There's a big sale on the Origin Store celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of EA's online store. They are offering a 40% discount on several PC digital download special editions. Also, MCV notes a Q&A from last week on GameSpot with EA's David DeMartini, who calls the service's first year "a huge success." He also offers a criticism of Origin's stickiness, saying this is something they need to address going forward. "Being self-critical of Origin, I would say it's not sticky enough. And we want to put features in place where we fully take advantage of your friends lists and gameplay activities amongst all of your friends so you can compare achievements," he says. "We want you to be able to challenge your friends, and to challenge your friends to play other EA games to try and achieve things that might even be across EA games. A lot of people are loyal to us and we need to reward them with that stickiness, so we're looking in that direction."

Jivaro wrote on Jun 18, 2012, 14:37:...people who buy those games "blindly" do so because of the franchise name not the publisher name.

I will say it is harder to do because so many of my loved publishers/developers got gobbled up into large mega-corporations, but there is still a small fanboy in me that takes extra notice when I see "Sqaure-Exix" or "Atlus" listed as a publisher on a game I know next to nothing about. More so when "Square-Enix" was still "Squaresoft". That might have more to do with the fact that I like JRPGs and they are the only real importers/developers of such.

I think it is hard to have that sort of relationship with EA because they publish such a large quantity of titles that you are bound to hate/have bad experiences with at least some of them and that may override in your memory the good. One would hope the good experiences you have your balance out the bad, numerically speaking, but that is up to EA.